Battleship Potemkin in UK cinemas from 29 April 2011

It’s official. According to the BFI website, the newly restored version of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1926) with the original score by Edmund Meisel, will get its UK theatrical release on 29 April. Watch this space!

When Eisenstein heard the score that had been such an incendiary success in Germany, he worried that Meisel’s powerful music overshadowed the film. But Potemkin was already proving inspirational and few images remain as potent as a pram careering down a staircase, still widely referenced today, at the climax of the massacre of Odessa’s civilians. Potemkin’s perennial freshness owes much to Eisenstein’s improvisation when he realised the potential of those steps, and of the battleship itself, as a cockpit for the stirring of revolutionary emotion, and with Meisel’s music it’s as powerful as ever. – Ian Christie